Bakandamiya—
Year 2023.
II
And grief’s fury cannot be quelled by even the purest love.
And not even the bluest flame can swallow my sickness.
In my nightly trance
I am walking home, all ten thousand miles long.
I am steering my way out of the groundswell of myth.
What else is there to find
here but a gathering of taillights as cars speed away
to God knows where? I have lived for 35 years.
For 35 years my body has been falling apart.
My tongue is soaked in the soil
of my forefathers. I learnt their language in the street,
in the talking drum of nights
and the flute of days, chasing after pelele in the fields,
and learning to cartwheel with friends.
Language is the song of our lives
and Haske, the friend that comes to my dreams,
says I have met Adam,
and Hawwa, whom I named my daughter after.
Bayaji
He wonders, it’ll seem, the religion
of Arabia is still feeble in the minds
of this people who, though, have not journeyed
as long as I have, have throats,
dried and wearier than the starry desert
my horse survived, licking
its own sweat. A woman in line
shouts, Only a tongue can grow a body.
He, the horseman of Baghdad,
faced by severe thirst, another—a wise child,
called him wind, because
without language you are without a body.
The priestesses like reeds,
halt after the last pull of a wind.
At once, breaking the circle,
a space flung open as he walked in
behind an oxcart of astonishment. The evening
loomed over the horizon,
like a stranger, itself, held away by the hands of spirits
and dead ancestors, transformed
by time and flawed into gods.
Bakandamiya XIX.
Even shadows could feel the quivering
of the bodies that made them.
The ground chuckles,
its laughter spuming up like a spring,
and gleeful children, like butterflies,
chase after each other
as they play the game of charapke.
A prayer bears out hidden desires
to loneliness,
a dark room bloated with hope.
Hope is the music that picked the villagers up, after
Sarki was vanquished.
But the geckos are Sarki’s eyes,
and they too, drop dead and effervesce
into the euphoria.
They say as he, the horseman, swung his sword,
Sarki’s head twirled in the air,
blood like liquid fingers stretching to keep
that which has been severed
to its crumbling body.
He is dead now, Sarki.
He’s survived a thousand years.
His death cry cleaved the earth.
On the vast plane of the great battle,
a cherry river flowed.
Kilometers away, a fierce puff of wind
About the Author:
Saddiq Dzukogi is a Nigerian poet based in the United States. He is the author of Your Crib, My Qibla, selected by Carolyn Forché as the winner of the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. His new book is the epic poem, Bakandamiya: An Elegy (University of Nebraska Press, 2025). Saddiq’s writing has been supported by the Nebraska Arts Council, Mississippi Arts Commission, and PEN America. His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, Georgia Review, Guernica, Kenyon Review, and Narrative Magazine. He is a fellow of Obsidian Foundation UK, as well as Cave Canem.
*Feature image by Mike Lerley on Unsplash
Isele Magazine 